2012 India blackouts
[12] Peak supply fell short of demand by an average of 9%, and the nation suffered from frequent power outages that lasted as long as 10 hours.
[citation needed] The Northern region also operates an internal HVDC line to transport power from generators in the east to consumers in the west.
Consequently, it began to lose frequency, and circuit breakers on the Northern-Eastern transmission lines acted to separate the now-out-of-sync grids.
[6] Officials described the failure as "the worst in a decade",[17] and a power company director noted that the "fairly large breakdown...exposed major technical faults in India's grid system.
The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) stated that the blackout had "severely impacted" businesses, leaving many unable to operate.
[18][14] The outage caused "chaos" for Monday morning rush hour, as passenger trains were shut down and traffic signals were non-operational.
Then the disaster continued along similar lines to the previous day: the Northern grid remained overloaded and the underfrequency load-shedding scheme failed to act.
[26] The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), not normally mandated to investigate blackouts, began to do so because of the threat to basic infrastructure facilities like railways, metro rail system, lifts in multi-storey buildings, and movement of vehicular traffic.
[32] In response to criticism, he observed that India was not alone in suffering major power outages, as blackouts had also occurred in the United States and Brazil within the previous few years.
[33] Washington Post described the failure as adding urgency to Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh's plan for a US$400 billion overhaul of India's power grid.
There is an urgent need to reform the power sector and bring about infrastructural improvements to meet the new challenges of the growing economy.
[36][37] Some trade papers noted that West Bengal's CESC microgrid and the Southern region had survived the blackout, and proposed further decentralization of the Indian grid.
It examined the causes of the blackout, and practicability of ensuring continued rail services during grid collapse, and issued its report on 16 August 2012.
[15]: 36–37 Power stations appeared to have had adequate generation capacity to avoid the blackouts, but had (contrary to regulations) not implemented droop speed control on their governors, or set it aggressively enough.
However, regulators incorrectly believed that they lacked legal authority to decrease the official capacity of failed grid segments in real time.
[15]: 33–35 The proximate cause of the blackouts was the multiple existing outages (both scheduled and forced) that had limited inter-regional power transmission corridors on the days of the failures.
[15] The committee also noticed that the grid appeared to have insufficient black start capability, requiring two separate rounds to bring all power plants on line.
However, delays in restarting the grid appeared to arise from constraints other than physical, as gas turbine power plants had also required an unduly long start-up time.
